The online retail giant Amazon expects to hire at least 1,000 new employees to staff its distribution center in Livonia.

The news came Tuesday as the Michigan Strategic Fund approved a $7.5 million grant for the company, which said in documents it could create as many as 1,500 for its center. Company representatives say the new jobs come with a full array of benefits.

To build out the new center, Amazon expects to make a capital investment of nearly $90 million in Livonia. In addition to state aid approved Tuesday, the City of Livonia has offered a tax abatement on real and/or personal property.

Amazon considered both Ohio and Indiana for the regional fulfillment center before choosing southeast Michigan, according to state officials. The new site was bought from the trust in charge of disposing old General Motors properties offloaded during the company's bankruptcy process, officials said.

"The low unemployment rate in Michigan has raised concern for the Company’s ability to hire the appropriate workforce," MEDC staff wrote in a memo to the Michigan Strategic Fund board members. "The funding will help the Company with recruiting and ensure this project occurs in Michigan.

Founded in 1994, Amazon.com is the largest internet-based retailer in the world by total sales and market capitalization. The company started as an online bookstore, later diversifying to offering a smorgasbord of products. The company employs more than 200,000 worldwide.

Amazon has not received any incentives from the Michigan Strategic Fund in the past.

Amazon already has about 100 people working downtown in office space at 150 W. Jefferson in Detroit. Amazon also operates what it calls a 'sortation' center in suburban Brownstown Township, and also has an audio-books operation called Brilliance Publishing in Grand Haven, near Lake Michigan.

The sortation center is a type of warehousing and shipping facility. Compared to enormous Amazon order fulfillment centers of 1 million square feet or more, the newer sortation centers, which Amazon has rapidly been adding near large cities since 2013, are about one-fourth the size of their bigger cousins — and designed to be speedier and expand deliveries to Sundays. The Brilliance operation in Grand Haven has about 150 people.

Michigan was not among the first places in the country where Amazon, the 21-year-old e-commerce outfit based in Seattle, hired lots of people or made big investments. The company has morphed rapidly from online book peddler to shipper of furniture, clothing and jewelry and then to consumer electronics production and cloud infrastructure provider. Texas, Delaware. Indiana, Arizona, New Jersey, Illinois, Wisconsin and other states got Amazon shipping centers well before Michigan.